[Haskell-cafe] problem with IO, strictness, and "let"

[Andrew Coppin]

Stefan O'Rear wrote:
> The problem is that you're closing the file twice.  When you call any
> function of the getContents family, you assign to that function the
> responsibility to close the file, no sooner than it is no longer needed.
> Don't call hClose yourself, Bad Things will happen.
>   

Care to elaborate on "bad things"? (I.e., will this just crash the 
program with an error, or will it do something more serious?) I must 
admit, I thought closing such a file was simply no-op.

I can't remember why exactly, but somewhere or other I wrote some code 
that does this. (Basically I want to shut the file without reading all 
of it, so I can reopen it and start reading from the beginning again.) 
Is there a sane way to do this? Or am I going to have to start playing 
with explicit reads and writes? (Obviously I could just hang on to *all* 
of the input stream returned from getContents - but that could be quite 
large. The current way gives me low memory usage...)